No. 08 (2004): Recycling the city

On the so-called age of the “developism”, back when the city was built under the unequivocal sign of the “edificability”, proceeding to an indiscriminate extension of its existent original scope, without other limitations that those imposed by the immediate estate gain, the quantification of what was built hid, substituted and, in some ways, represented the well-known and expected lack of quality of the final product, specially that which was explained by the housing-social equipment duality. The construction of the city, indeed, was more similar to a pact between all those that were interested on this process of development, measured in a quantitative light, than in expressing the “rights” and “freedoms” that could contribute towards the improvement of the living conditions of its inhabitants.

So many contradictions were generated by this way of responding to the construction of the city that there was no other recourse but to question its principles with the goal of recovering unspoken rights, never-met demands. Social movements linked with democratic citizenship organizations, as well as the added impulse of the vital development of a politic democracy by the State, opened the way, as it could not be otherwise, to a much more auspicious social attitude, channeling a process geared towards a decidedly democratic understanding of the practice of urban planning.